November 13, 2014

The Social Media Paradox

It may be that the best way to have success in social media is to do less.

Here's my thinking.

First, let's get rid of the delusions. While social media marketing is a nice way to keep in
touch with your customers and a nice way to respond to customer problems, overall it has been a flabby failure at building brands.

While there are certainly some cases of social media success, in most categories social media marketing has had little to no effect on business growth.

Without going through a whole lot of argument on this, just do an experiment to prove it to yourself. Go to your neighborhood supermarket and cruise the aisles. Make a list of all the products and all the brands that were built by social media marketing. The answer will be somewhere between zero and nothing.

There are, however, certain categories in which social media can be substantially influential. These include restaurants, hotels, certain consumer services, and travel-related categories.

The problem for you as a marketer is that in every one of these categories the type of social media that is influential is substantially free of marketer interference. In other words, it is essentially consumer-to-consumer.

In fact, there is an inverse relationship between social media effectiveness and perceived marketer involvement. The more people sense the heavy hand of marketing, the less inclined they are to believe the reviews that are the soul of social media success in these categories.

The danger in trying to clumsily insert yourself into "the conversation" among consumers is that social media failure does a lot more harm than social media success does good.

If you're in one of the categories in which social media is substantially influential, your best strategy may be to shut the hell up.

Give your customers excellent products, excellent service, and excellent value. Then let them do your social media work for you (they're a lot less expensive than social media "experts" and a lot more reliable.)

You can learn from the social media disaster that is McDonald's and the amazing success of Apple, despite its famous aversion to social media marketing.

That's the social media paradox: often the less you try, the more you succeed.

As a web analyst, it's always humbling to see how big companies with 10+ social media teams bring in just as much web traffic from social sites as does a ma and pa internet retailer. We're talking barely a tenth of a percent.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."